Reviews: Pierce, Alexandra

Letters to Tiptree —
Alexandra Pierce & Alisa Krasnostein

Alexandra
Pierce and Alisa Krasnostein’s 2015’s Letters to Tiptree delivers
exactly what it promises in the title … and more!

While
women have always written science fiction, their presence in the
field grew phenomenally in the 1960s and 1970s. And many of these new
writers were very talented. I remember looking at a stack of new SF
novels I had just purchased and realizing that none of them had been
written by men.

But
there was one major talent to whom the men could point, a male talent
who proved that men were still players in the top leagues. To quote
Ted Sturgeon1

“nearly
all of the top newer writers, with
the exception of James Tiptree, Jr.,
were women.”

For
those of you tuning in late, James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen-name of
Alice Bradley Sheldon. But this book isn’t so much about Tiptree,
exactly2. It’s about how she affected her friends and readers …
which includes the readers who might have been her friends had she
not shot herself on May 19, 1987.